


Felt

by MathConcepts



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Booker tries to help, Gen, Nile is trying to acclimate, Nile is young and that's important, bonding moment, slight introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:55:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26221492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathConcepts/pseuds/MathConcepts
Summary: He tries to help. He understands...a little.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman
Comments: 4
Kudos: 54





	Felt

**Author's Note:**

> Can be read as just friendship or pre-relationship.

She's still looking at her hand, tracing and re-tracing her fingers over the lines of her palm. Her hands are dark and smooth, smooth in the only the way youth is.  
  
  
She's now the youngest, and in more ways than one. Each one of them was nearing, or in Andy's case were at their majority when they died for the first time, but Nile is not. Not even thirty, if Booker takes a guess. _She's just a baby_ , Andy had said, and Nile is. But she's not a _child_.  
  
He hardly knows her, but he won't do her the disservice of dismissing her because of her age. She's one of them. She's starting off as they all had.   
  
There's something in her eyes and the set to her shoulders, something about the way she holds herself here in her new circumstance, wary, alert, but steady, so steady. Not a child, not in any sense of the word. But young, so terribly young and naive.   
  
He wonders if anything he's said has made an impression her, and hopes that is has. She'll learn for herself, maybe sooner, maybe later, but she will learn. If sharing what he can with her can soften the blow to come one day, then well...  
  
  
She's reaching up to her neck now, tugging on the chains around it, but soon gives up that pretense and cups a hand around her throat, her eyes focused on nothing, and it doesn't take much to know what she's thinking of.  
  
  
"I felt it happen." He says before he can have second thoughts. It might not be the wisest thing to say to her now. But he needs to share it, for some reason he can't explain.  
  
It's just them now, across each other from the fire, him and this woman and all the years that stretch backwards and forwards around them. Maybe he needs her to know that someone else knows, someone else _understands_. It's not a knowledge he can say he has for himself.  
  
Her eyes snap to him, reflections burning in them, tiny flames dancing in the center of each. As if he's looking through her eyes into a fire beyond. _She has potential_ , Andy said. She does, she does. He can see that.  
  
Her hand slips from her throat, and the flames crackle, spitting sparks into the air. "What...did it feel like?" she says, and then quickly, "Did it hurt you?"  
  
He chuckles, picks up a stick to poke the fire back into line. "Not more so than any other time."  
  
"Oh."  
  
There's something like disappointment in her voice, like she was expecting _more_ , and he jabs a few times at the coals before going on. He has no interest in sugar-coating things to paint a more illustrious portrait. If madness lies the other way, bitter betrayal lies in doing that.  
  
However, he can try to give her the only explanation he has, whatever explanation he's scraped from all the years he's lived.  
  
"Another person's pain is...different. Like an echo. You feel it, but it isn't yours. It's like...watching someone you love get hurt." _A child, his child, sobbing in pain at a twisted ankle, the ache deep in his chest as he tried to console him._ A pain part of him, but not yet his.  
  
"Oh." she says again. Maybe she understands, maybe she doesn't. But she will someday.  
  
  
And maybe she'll be alright.  
  



End file.
